The Town Talk · Alexandria, Louisiana · 21 July 1996
CP-1996-024
Losing Jerusalem
Palestinians’ hope for capital in east Jerusalem is fading
Transcribed from the clipping
JERUSALEM (AP) — The lights go out early in Arab east Jerusalem. After sundown, storekeepers along Salah Edin Street pull down their shutters and the few restaurants close for lack of customers.
Just 15 miles from east Jerusalem’s main shopping avenue, traffic jams the commercial district in the West Bank town of Ramallah, where dozens of stores, boutiques and discos have opened in recent months.
The shift in action to Ramallah is only one of many signs that the Palestinians are losing ground in east Jerusalem, which they hope to turn into the capital of their own state.
The new right-wing Israeli government recently revoked the residency permits of hundreds of Palestinians in the city and is preparing to start building another big Jewish neighborhood in east Jerusalem. At the same time, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority has quietly shut several offices in Jerusalem, opting to avoid a showdown with Israel it feels it would only lose.
And plans to build Palestinian neighborhoods in east Jerusalem with $30 million from Saudi Arabia have been thwarted by Israel’s refusal to grant construction permits. So the Saudis have kept their aid, and east Jerusalem’s worsening housing shortage has forced thousands of Palestinians to move to the city’s suburbs in the West Bank autonomy zone.
Officials of the Palestinian Authority acknowledge that many of Jerusalem’s Arab residents no longer look to Arafat for help and instead try to move under Israel’s widening umbrella of services in a de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty.
“We are loosing our credibility in the eyes of the people in Jerusalem because they see us as being unable to do anything for them,” said Anis Al Qaq, deputy director of the Palestinian Planning Ministry. “People cannot live on national dreams. They need food, health care and education.”
Israel annexed east Jerusalem into its capital after capturing it from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war. Today, the city has 405,000 Jewish and 160,000 Palestinian residents.
How this transcription was made
Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person.
Context added by this archive
Date check: The page line reads only “The Town Talk, Alexandria-Pineville, La.” — no date and no page number are printed in the part of the page that was scanned, so the slide date 1996-07-21 could not be confirmed.
A house advertisement on the same page carries the dates “JULY 23” and “AUGUST 12-14”, which is consistent with a paper of around 21 July but does not establish it.
Cite this clipping
"Losing Jerusalem," The Town Talk, 21 July 1996. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1996-024. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1996-024
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More from the 1990s
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- All 374 clippings from the 1990s →
The same copy, in 4 other papers
Palestinians losing ground to IsraelLNP Lancaster Online21 July 1996CP-1996-017
Palestinians losing ground in hoped-for capitalPress of Atlantic CityAtlantic City, New Jersey21 July 1996CP-1996-019
Arabs moving out of Jerusalem to West BankThe Herald-TimesBloomington, Indiana21 July 1996CP-1996-020
Palestinians shift action to Ramallah, losing ground in east JerusalemThe Star-LedgerNewark, New Jersey21 July 1996CP-1996-023
Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.
Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1996-024.
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